Jeroen's Weblog

My schedule is now online

Often I get questions like “When do you have time for…?”, now you can see it yourself! I’ve published my calendar online, you can see it at http://jeroenlandheer.com/Calendar

Or if you want it to add this to your Outlook, simply open this link.

A new website layout

I decided to change the website layout, I hope you all like it :)

Fun with byte arrays

Some easy and fun byte array extensions

  static class ByteArrayExtensions
  {
    public static string ToHexString(this byte[] bytes)
    {
      StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
      for (int i = 0; i < bytes.Length; i++)
      {
        sb.AppendFormat("{0:X2}", bytes[i]);
      }
      return sb.ToString();
    }
    
    public static byte[] Copy(this byte[] bytes)
    {
      byte[] result = new byte[bytes.Length];
      Buffer.BlockCopy(bytes, 0, result, 0, bytes.Length);
      return result;
    }
  }

  public static class ByteArray
  {
    public static byte[] Concat(params byte[][] bytes)
    {
      int resultLength = 0;
      for (int i = 0; i < bytes.Length; i++)
      {
        resultLength += bytes[i].Length;
      }

      var result = new byte[resultLength];
      int resultPosition = 0;
      for (int i = 0; i < bytes.Length; i++)
      {
        Buffer.BlockCopy(bytes[i], 0, result, resultPosition, bytes[i].Length);
        resultPosition += bytes[i].Length;
      }
      return result;
    }
  }

Time for a universal software updater?

Just one of the things the average user is batteling with every patch tuesday is that if you have 10 different software products installed, you have 10 different update procedures to go through. Something tells me this could (and should) be a lot simpler.

One of the best updaters in the software industry is Windows Update. Without a doubt it is the least intrusive (no popups), does it work when you want it to (when you either shut down your computer or when you leave your PC alone for a long time) and is fully configurable by system administrators. Besides Windows Update, there are tons of other updaters out there. Updaters like Adobe Flash, Adobe Air, Adobe Updater (the one included with Acrobat, Photoshop and so on), Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome, Skype’s built-in updater, Sun’s Java … to name a few.

All these programs have one thing in common: They ask me to update. It’s getting more anoying each time. Then with that, there’s a bit more that comes into play. Some of these programs need administrator access to do their updating. System administrators often configure end-user computers to not allow a user to have administrative rights. Getting all software provisioned and keeping it up-to-date in a big network really becomes quite a challenge.

What if we simply say, let the OS provide a universal updater for our software. Microsoft will probably say: “You can already do this…”, but that is not really the case. What we need is a way for applications to plug themselves into the Windows Updater in such a way that the user has the ability to update all the software solutions he has on the computer with one click of a button. One thing is for sure, there are a lot of silly questions that need to be answered like: “But do I give my update process to Microsoft?” The answer is obviously no.

Implementing a universal updater by extending the Windows Update mechanism is something Microsoft already did for themselves. Microsoft Update extends Windows Update by updating not only Windows, but also products like Microsoft Office. Same thing can be done for updating other organization’s products. Let’s say an organization simply provides his update service like normal, chooses to ‘register’ his company’s update in a Windows Update API, which asks the end user for consent. Now every time Windows is checking updates, the updater of the other company will run aswell.

It really shouldn’t be that hard, and it is a feature that will help end-users keeping their systems more up-to-date and secure.